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Netflix and Amazon Prime may not be the place to go for hit movies(Photo credit: adria.richards)

Last week, I looked at which 2012 hits were streaming online. When I do such research, one of the common complain is that I should not be looking to recent movies since they are mostly not available even on paid cable TV. This week, I'm delving deeper into the data set by assessing whether the top hits from last year (and the year before) are available for legal streaming.

Subscription services

Let's first take a look at the two top paid all-you-can-eat subscription services: Netflix and Amazon Prime (remember that Amazon Prime is different from Amazon VOD in that it follows a model similar to Netflix's). So how available are the top 100 movies of 2011, movies that were released over a year ago and have gone through the usual release windows of movie theater release, DVD releases, and paid TV releases.:

There's a lot of red there, showing that a lot of hit movies are still not available on those services. Netflix has 19 of the top 100 hits of 2011 available and Amazon Prime offers 14 of them. One thing that surprised me here is that, compared to last year, Amazon seems to have made some progress in terms of catching up to Netflix. However, this is still a dismal showing for both services as they present less than one out of five hit movies from over a year ago.

Since I was looking, I figured I would also investigate how movies from 2010, when I first started this series, fared. These are movies that have gone, without a doubt, through all possible release window you can imagine. So what does it look like? Let's see:

Rank

Movie Title

Netflix

Amazon Prime

1

Toy Story 3

No

No

2

Alice in Wonderland

No

No

3

Iron Man 2

No

No

4

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

No

No

5

Inception

No

No

6

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

No

No

7

Despicable Me

No

No

8

Shrek Forever After

No

No

9

How to Train Your Dragon

No

No

10

Tangled

No

No

11

The Karate Kid

No

No

12

Clash of the Titans

No

No

13

Grown Ups

No

No

14

Tron Legacy

No

No

15

Megamind

No

No

16

Little Fockers

No

No

17

The Last Airbender

No

No

18

True Grit

Yes

Yes

19

Shutter Island

No

No

20

The Other Guys

No

No

21

Salt

No

No

22

Jackass 3D

Yes

No

23

Valentine's Day

No

No

24

Robin Hood

No

No

25

The Expendables

Yes

Yes

26

Due Date

No

No

27

The Chronicle of Narnia: Voyage of the DawnTreader

No

No

28

Date Night

No

No

29

Sex and the City 2

No

No

30

The Social Network

No

No

31

The Book of Eli

No

No

32

The Town

No

No

33

Prince of Persia: Sands of time

No

No

34

Red

No

No

35

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief

No

No

36

Paranormal Activity 2

Yes

Yes

37

Yogi Bear

No

No

38

Eat Pray Love

No

No

39

Unstoppable

No

No

40

Dear John

No

No

41

The A-team

No

No

42

Knight & Day

No

No

43

Black Swan

No

No

44

Dinner for Schmucks

No

No

45

The Fighter

No

No

46

The Bounty Hunter

No

No

47

The Tourist

No

No

48

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

No

No

49

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

No

No

50

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

No

No

51

The Last Song

No

No

52

The Wolfman

No

No

53

Get him to the Greek

No

No

54

Resident Evil: Afterlife

No

No

55

Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too

No

No

56

Tooth Fairy

No

No

57

Secretariat

No

No

58

Easy A

No

No

59

Takers

No

No

60

Legend of the Guardians

No

No

61

Life as We Know It

No

No

62

Letters to Juliet

No

No

63

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

No

No

64

Predators

No

No

65

Hot Tub Time Machine

No

No

66

Kick-Ass

No

No

67

The King's Speech

Yes

No

68

Killers

No

No

69

Saw 3D

No

No

70

Cop Out

No

No

71

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore

No

No

72

Edge of Darkness

No

No

73

Death at a Funeral

No

No

74

Step-Up 3D

No

No

75

The Last Exorcism

Yes

Yes

76

Legion

No

No

77

The Crazies

No

No

78

Gulliver's Travels

No

No

79

Burlesque

No

No

80

For Colored Girls

Yes

Yes

81

The Back-up Plan

No

No

82

Vampires Suck

No

No

83

The American

No

No

84

Green Zone

No

No

85

Marmaduke

No

No

86

Devil

No

No

87

Hereafter

No

No

88

When in Rome

No

No

89

Love and Other Drugs

No

No

90

She's Out of My League

No

No

91

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

No

No

92

Charlie St. Cloud

No

No

93

Morning Glory

Yes

Yes

94

Daybreakers

No

No

95

How Do You Know

No

No

96

Nanny McPhee Returns

No

No

97

The Switch

No

No

98

Brooklyn's Finest

No

No

99

Machete

No

No

100

Ramona and Beezus

No

No

You would think that hit movies from 2010 would be available on services like Netflix and Amazon Prime in 2013. But, by the look of it, there is still much work to be done here. Netflix has 8 titles, while Amazon Prime has 6. In other words, it appears that the deeper you go into the catalog, the fewer hits you get.

Having looked at the position of 300 titles, which gives us a pretty decent data set, let's see what availability of blockbuster hits on rental services looks like:

So looking at a 3 year range, Netflix offer 10.6% of the top titles to come out that year and Amazon Prime offers 7.3%. If they are to compete with regular cable TV, they might have some catching up to do.

Later this week, we'll take a look at how those titles fared on internet VOD services. Stay tuned!